Bhubaneswar: Forest department in Rourkela has introduced an innovative early warning system to combat elephant-human conflicts in vulnerable villages. The solar-powered audio systems have been installed across 23 villages to alert residents about elephant movements.Forest officials monitoring from the control room can activate the customised audio announcements upon detecting elephant presence in the area through drones, AI cameras, or designated elephant tracking personnel.Divisional forest officer (Rourkela) Jashabanta Sethi said a customised message in Odia that can be easily understood by villagers will be recorded, and the audio will be uploaded in a software application. “Once the audio is furnished in the system, on pressing the button, the audio will be played at a certain decibel to warn the entire village about an elephant herd coming to their village. There will be several varieties of customised audio,” said Sethi.Messages such as “Hati pala gaon pakhare acchanti, apana mane satarka ruhantu” (elephant herd near the village, you people beware) will be fed into the system so that it is played when the button is pressed in the control room. “It is not that at a time, it will be echoed in all the 23 villages. The system has been designed in such a way that if ‘A’ village has elephant presence, the warning audio will be played at that village only,” the senior forest officer added.The sound system, powered by solar energy, has been installed atop tall poles at vantage points in the villages. If a village is large, two systems have been used for better coverage of announcements. “If it is a success, all the villages reporting elephant menace will have the early warning system,” the DFO said.In Dec last year in the Rourkela division, a herd of 28 elephants, including calves (which couldn’t be counted), was saved from being hit by a train due to artificial intelligence (AI)-based thermal cameras. The herd was detected by the camera automatically at night along the Bandhamunda-Barsuan railway track, which usually sees the movement of goods trains in Rourkela. After the AI camera detected the movement of the herd and sent automatic inputs with locational details and pictures to the control room of both the forest department and the railway, the movement of a goods train was delayed by half an hour at the previous station, allowing the elephants to cross the track. This was the first time in the state that technology use saved elephant herds from a near-fatal situation.